I've heard some say that The Doomsday Clock is basically the last gasp of the Nu-52, that it's ultimately a rejection of the kind of superhero setting Watchmen set up, and will be a return to more traditional DC storytelling after.

And my GOD do I hope it's true, because between it and Heroes in Crisis, I'm sick of how . . . well, broken superhero comics seem. Heroes in Crisis basically turns everyone into broken individuals on the verge of collapse. The Doomsday Clock has the DCU being called a "simpler" place than the Watchmen universe, and contains an entire page of Ozymandias railing about how little the heroes of the DCU have done to fix their world. There's also The Supermen Theory which claims that the reason most superheroes in the DCU are American is because the US government is creating them as part of some scheme, and apparently it's at least partially true.

I HATE stuff like this. Instead of just saying that non-American heroes exist, showing and creating them, they have to come up with some in-story reason for this, beyond, you know, most superhero comic writers are American and set the stories in America.

If Heroes in Crisis and Doomsday Clock are the top of the hill we need to get over before we get back to something resembling the pre-Identity Crisis DCU, I'm willing to grit my teeth through it. But dear Lord in Heaven this is a slog.

Your mountain climbing analogue is Spot on,IMHO. If DC and Marvel would just Wake up and realize their destroying the very medium they work in,we could actually save it in time.
Did you know that certain DC/Marvel Writers&Artists haven't been able to find work afterward BECAUSE of what they did to Beloved Comic Characters and have gone on record saying that they should've been stopped by their Editors,but wasn't due to the Execs over-rulling it?

I mean, if they use this as a way to have more heroes around the globe, I'm all for that, but we shouldn't really have needed it in the first place. DC already had a tone of lesser known heroes and international heroes it could simply bring back and/or re-invent and had plenty of global teams around the world WITHOUT having to have this crapsack world scenario where it's odd about how many superheroes are American.

I mean, if Geoff Johns, James Robinson and others can stop killing off lesser known heroes simply for shock value.

Here's an idea: hire one or more people specifically to go through the vast history of DC Comics. Find every minority and non-American hero you can, create a giant spreadsheet with them, and then work with some of your best creative minds to turn them into actually decent heroes. Break out the Milestone heroes, the Global Guardians, the Great 10, every non-American member of the Justice League International/Europe, the Ultramarine Corps, characters from Bloodlines and the Planet DC initiative like the Janissary, the old Super Powers/Super Friends ethnic heroes and actually work on revamping them and making them a part of the universe. I would bet folding money you could easily create an expanded setting with many global heroes with what already is there.

Latest issue of Doomsday Clock is out. I want this series and Heroes in Crisis to both end.

Spoiler Warning.

They bring up Darkseid and the Anti-Monitor as examples of who the heroes have defeated in the past, and . . . Dr. Manhattan just proceeds to basically walk all over every superhero in the DCU that isn't named Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman. He casually destroys a Green Lantern ring. He absorbs magical energy, comes up with a techno-babble explanation for it and uses it to casually toss around folks like Dr. Fate and Zatanna. He casually smacks around the Nu-Shazam kids. Dr. Martin Stein is effectively turned into a villain. Firestorm is able to harm Manhattan a little, and Captain Atom is able to basically disintegrate him . . . only for Manhattan to casually reform and just as casually knock everyone out.

Meanwhile, Lex Luthor approaches Lois Lane to reveal that Wally West, who is apparently dead, is actually important. Batman is trying to warn the team sent to confront Manhattan that this is potentially a trap. Wonder Woman tries to calm the UN when Black Adam shows up with several supervillains to make his move.

It's very bleak, and Gary Frank's art just adds to the bleakness. Frank's art should frankly (heh) never be used for traditional superhero comics, because intentional or not, his art feels like it's a deconstruction of classic superheroes. It worked great for Supreme Power, but it just doesn't work for Batman or Superman.

And there's STILL 3 more issues to go.

The idea that Dr. Manhattan is somehow a threat rivaling Darkseid or the Anti-Monitor is just weird to me. In his own setting, Manhattan basically only came off as a godlike because he was the only superpowered guy on the planet. They even admitted he couldn't stop all of the nukes that could be launched by the Russians at once, but he's basically being treated like he's the Beyonder.

The idea that Dr. Manhattan is somehow a threat rivaling Darkseid or the Anti-Monitor is just weird to me. In his own setting, Manhattan basically only came off as a godlike because he was the only superpowered guy on the planet. They even admitted he couldn't stop all of the nukes that could be launched by the Russians at once, but he's basically being treated like he's the Beyonder.

Devil's advocating -- and if I dislike this book less than Heroes in Crisis, it's a very narrow race -- I should point out that (a) there's an unreliable narrator aspect to that statement re: the missiles, as Professor Glass may or may not have had an accurate picture of what Dr. Manhattan could do when pressed, and (b) the version of the character who appears in this series is a version who has had an unquantifiable time period to develop his faculties since last we saw him.

The idea that Dr. Manhattan is somehow a threat rivaling Darkseid or the Anti-Monitor is just weird to me. In his own setting, Manhattan basically only came off as a godlike because he was the only superpowered guy on the planet. They even admitted he couldn't stop all of the nukes that could be launched by the Russians at once, but he's basically being treated like he's the Beyonder.

Devil's advocating -- and if I dislike this book less than Heroes in Crisis, it's a very narrow race -- I should point out that (a) there's an unreliable narrator aspect to that statement re: the missiles, as Professor Glass may or may not have had an accurate picture of what Dr. Manhattan could do when pressed, and (b) the version of the character who appears in this series is a version who has had an unquantifiable time period to develop his faculties since last we saw him.

Fair point, but it's odd to me that Dr. Manhattan could be considered a threat on par with Darkseid, let alone the Anti-Monitor. I tended to view Manhattan as more akin to Dr. Solar of Valiant Comics, who was incredibly powerful, able to destroy a planet if he'd absorbed enough power from a star, but was likewise someone who wasn't really more powerful than the Silver Surfer in practice. It's clear that they've made Manhattan way more powerful than anything he did in the original Watchmen series, but it still just strikes me as weird.

That said, there are implications that Manhattan isn't the one truly behind all of this, so who knows?

I will say that, much like a Doomsday Clock, I keep checking my watch to see if this story is over yet.

Nonetheless, I think that whole sequence shows that raw power obviously wasn't going to take out Osterman. I feel it could confirm a theory I've had since the beginning, that Superman vs Dr. Manhattan is not going to be a fist fight, but an ethical debate about hope. The man-god who has lost his humanity against the man-god who embodies hope and altruism.

My initial response was very profanity laden, but I took a deep breath and decided to dial it back.

Instead, let me say this:

This comics sucks. It is a complete waste of a solid artist, it is apparently this long diatribe against receiving therapy as Tom King decides to break and deconstruct the DCU in an effort to make them as broken as himself. I know King says he suffers from his own PTSD and wanted to use these characters to explore that, but you don't take these iconic characters and break them so that they're as messed up as you are. At best, you pull a Watchmen and tell your own story far away from these heroes so you don't screw with characters who have a fanbase.

Tom King doesn't just kill a lot of characters, he DESTROYS them.

Dan DiDio needs to go. He needs to go now, because any editor worth his salt would have stopped this series before it ever happened.

Now maybe this final issue will make it all just a dream, or the murderer will somehow undo it, but this was not worth the paper it was printed on. It does not need to exist.